AdeleneDawner comments on Mere Messiahs - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (83)
Back when I was a Muslim, in my final stage right before stumbling on this place, which was the final catalyst for me turning Atheist, I had decided to disregard Sharia and even direct Qranic law in every point in which it conflicted with my consciousness. My reasoning was that either God would understand that due to the social and intellectual progress since the times of Muhammad and would accept my behaviour as obeying the spirit of the Law rather than the dead letter, OR that he was more similar to that Jehovah prick than I thought, which meant I didn't care if such a despicable being would want to punish me eternally for this.
Of course, there isn't anything heroic about that. It would just have meant disobeying Him in fairly standard ways that are already practiced by most alledged Muslims, such as not flaying adulterers, not cutting thieves' hands, not forcing your wife to be an eternal minor under male tutelage, and so on. Except I had though about it and deliberately decided to violate God and the Prophet's commands, unlike what other people did, which was merely Not Thinking About It.
Then I read Religion's Claim To Be Non Disprovable among other things and thought: "If I'm going to favour my own principles AND empirical evidence OVER Word Of God, I might as well give up on religion entirely and save myslef much guilt and fear."
Drop the 'empirical evidence' bit and this is basically how I decided to leave Christianity: Some bits of advice in the bible are obviously wrong, and if I'm going to be using my own judgment to determine which of the questionable bits are right and which are wrong, I might as well just use my own judgment in general.
I suspect that this kind of reasoning might be more palatable to religious folks than the more common proofs that religion is wrong on matters of fact.
That argument is applicable only to Protestants, though. As a Catholic, you have no business interpreting the Bible yourself. (And the same holds for the Orthodox too.)
The Bible might in fact contain a number of blatant scientific errors. That would be far more difficult to pull off with Muslims, since the Qran is far less error ridden (being incredibly ellyptic helps) and may in fact contain remarks that have turned out to be confirmed by Science, or so do most Muslims believe.
That and, well, God being alledgely omnipotent means he could have created the Universe five minutes ago, so the most you can say is that believing in Him and his Books is useless at best and misleading at worst.